iSearch Site Search Engine

iSearch is a tool for allowing visitors to a website to perform a search on the contents of the site. Unlike some other such tools the spidering engine is written in PHP, so it does not require binaries to be run on the server. META tags are supported, such as description, keywords and robots. iSearch performs result scoring, placing the highest ranking matches first. Works fine in PHP safe mode. Auto Spider feature keeps your index up-to-date without relying on cron jobs. Multi-language and style sheets for search results.

User Reviews

good, except for dynamic sites

Rating: 4 - Very Good

Reviewed by
Anonymous
on Jul 25th, 2003

Isearch is really good and quite easy to configure. It works well and provides nice logs of indexing and searching. However, its only provision for pages produced dynamically - "Remove GET Variables" - is far from enough for sites where all pages are served dynamically, eg. from a data base. Removal off all GET variables results in all pages having the same name. If they are not removed, the same pages get indexed many many times over.
I'm wondering why GET variables and their values couldn't be included in page names. That would make Isearch a truly first class page indexer.

RE: good, except for dynamic sites(AUTHOR RESPONSE)

The "Remove GET Variables" allows specific GET variables to be removed. It does not remove all GET variables. This is exactly what a site with dynamic content needs. It allows you to remove specific GET variables which result in duplicate pages and leave variables that do not. For instance, if you have a dynamically generated page with a GET variable called "sort" to determine the sort order or a page, you can remove it to prevent the page being indexed multiple times with the same contents, just sorted diffently.
Have I misunderstood your problem? Let me know via the mailing list, and we can discuss the problems that you have been having in more detail.

Superb, easy to install and run, this one is for you too!

Rating: 5 - Excellent

Reviewed by
Anonymous
on May 9th, 2003

I've been spending all week trying to install and configure goodness knows how many search scripts for my web site. I avoided this one because the home page looked so unprofessional. The truth is, it was easy to install. It can index more than one site, which is cool because we own five web sites all of which are interlinked. You can exclude areas of your

area from the indexing, to avoid messy scripts showing up! The control panel is excellent, the search results are well laid out and professional. No real knowledge of pHp or MYSQL are needed, just a bit of common sense. All in all, buy it! (It's free for non-commercial use, but a donation is worth it, and that coming from an old miser like me, if only I had some money!)

An excellent all round search engine

Rating: 5 - Excellent

Reviewed by
Anonymous
on Jan 22nd, 2003

I first tried iSearch several versions back, when it had fewer features. Now, the latest version (1.5) has been released and I believe it is one of the best PHP search engines I've tried.
The biggest "pro" is that iSearch can index your site like it was browsing the site, rather than a lot of other search engines which connect via FTP and read the source of the files - which can result in scripting such as PHP being spidered.
In the latest version, there are more search options such as exact string, search term highlighting and a Google "style" description option, which allows the search term and surrounding words to be show in the search results description.
Spidering the site is simple, if you have access to run cron jobs you can do it automatically, or you can include a autospider script on pages which will spider your site every so often when people visit that page.
There are not many cons that I can think of, other than there are few advanced search options - but new options are being added with most releases.
The help & support is great - via the iSearch mailing list. You can suggest changes and improvements, and if reasonable and viable they will be added.
All round, I think it's a big thumbs up, and a big thanks to Mr Willis for all his had work on such a great search engine!